I've seen many iterations of this type of debate by now, and learned to recognize the patterns. The people arguing for the ostensibly simpler solution are reall

I've seen many iterations of this type of debate by now, and learned to recognize the patterns. The people arguing for the ostensibly simpler solution are really asking you to trust their ability to architect apps out of simpler building blocks without using an abstraction that they don't like. This can work, but it often leads to situations like someone writing a bespoke system, then leaving the job or otherwise imposing extra complexity on the team. In the immediate term, what often gets overlooked is - The ORM is an externally maintained open-source project with a plurality of contributors; "just write SQL" is not - The ORM is designed to support the full lifecycle of the application including migrations; "just write SQL" is not - The ORM is documented to be legible to newcomers; "just write SQL" is not (for all but the simplest of applications) - The ORM is composable and extensible with opinionated and customizable interfaces for doing so (I've lost track of the number of times I've had my mind blown by how elegant and smart Django and SQLAlchemy's query management tooling is) - The ORM has a security posture that allows you to both reason about your application's security and receive security updates when bugs are found - The ORM is a platform for many other modules responsible for different layers of the application (DRF, OpenAPI, django-admin, testing utilities, etc. etc.) to plug into and allow the application to grow sustainably I now try to guide people to a middle ground. Yes, both Django's and SQLAlchemy's ORMs can be annoying, have performance issues, etc. But for large applications maintained by multiple people over time, their benefits usually outweigh the drawbacks. Both have extensible architectures that allow customization and opinionated restriction of the interface that the ORM presents. If you're unhappy with your organization's ORM, I suggest you try that route first.